Potential Matters customizes coaching programs to each client's individual needs.

Professional Coaching for Executives and Emerging Leaders

Entrepreneurship and Self-employment

Career Strategy

Work-Life Integration

Professional Coaching

Executives, and professionals on the executive track, use coaching to achieve higher levels of success within the organization. As professionals move up in responsibility, there are fewer and fewer internal resources to help professionals grow and develop. A coach is a dedicated and focused sounding board for your business goals and your strategies for success in the face of roadblocks, and provides insight to sharpen leadership skills and improve personal and organizational performance.

Coaching goals are typically focused on organizational performance or development, but may also have a personal component as well. The results produced from the executive coaching relationship are observable and measurable for the organization.

Some of the issues we help our clients address:

• Making the transition from producer to leader.
• Assessing and preparing for new levels of responsibility.
• Navigating interpersonal situations and learning to successfully “read” others to improve interpersonal effectiveness up and across the organization.
• Improving conflict management skills by negotiating and compromising more effectively.
• Identifying and adapting behaviors that are creating barriers to success.
• Gaining perspective on how to handle personal versus organizational interests.
• Handling and managing the rapid pace of corporate change brought on by mergers or acquisitions, or other internal and external dynamics.
• Improving executive presence and personal reputation.
• Fully tapping into personal and professional potential.

Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment

A growing number of professionals are expected to undertake some form of self-employment in the years ahead as corporations continue to outsource functions once handled in-house – from marketing and corporate communications to IT, finance, and even human-resources administration. While fewer corporate positions are available with larger organizations, the demand for freelance and contract workers, consultants, and small, independent businesses to service large organizations will continue to grow.

Regardless of whether you want to launch your own business, or if corporate layoffs helped open the door for creative career options, new skills and professional development strategies are needed to successfully own and operate your own business. Coaching can help.

Coaching helps you tackle these challenges:

• Personal readiness for being on your own.
• Navigating the basics of business ownership.
• Finding the right resources and professionals to ensure your business succeeds.
• Clarifying and sticking to your professional boundaries.
• Creating your business story.
• Partnering and networking to grow your business.
• Strategies to keep business pipeline strong.
• Avoiding classic small business mistakes.
• Optimizing marketing and sales strategies.
• Creating big perception for a small business.

Career Strategy

In his book, We Are All Self-Employed, Cliff Hakim provides a wonderful framework for rethinking our professional mindset. Hakim poignantly reminds us that job security has ceased to exist, and that each of us must take full responsibility for our career mobility and advancement.

Whether you are in the midst of an active job search, considering a career change or just want to advance in your current job, a coach acts as a guide and objective sounding board so you can achieve your career goals more quickly. Just a few of the issues we help clients address:

Career Transition:

• Coping with a layoff or termination
• Launching a high-impact job search
• Increasing your offers with effective interviewing
• Broadening your network as a long-term career survival strategy
• Evolving your resume over your career span
• Making a career change from one industry to another
• Effectively negotiating one or more job offers
• Exploring new fields or career avenues
• Considering temp, contract, or consulting options

Career Advancement:

• Assessing opportunities and developing strategies to advance within an existing employer
• Negotiating for a promotion
• Preparing for a performance or salary review
• Navigating corporate politics
• Surviving a regime change or merger/acquisition
• Managing a new boss or difficult team member
• Preparing for new responsibilities
• Managing during difficult times

Work-Life Integration

The challenges of integrating work and personal or family life are part of everyday reality for most every professional working today. Life, by the very nature of the multiple roles that we play, creates natural conflict, and no place is that more in evidence than the intersection of our work and family life.

Having it all and trying to manage it all brings a new level of stress and anxiety to our lives, but many professionals are beginning to reflect on and take action to better integrate work and life responsibilities. With creativity, courage and clarity of goals, coaching can help you with practical strategies to evaluate and implement your own personal work-life plan.

Some of the issues we help clients address:

• Clarity of work-life goals
• Managing priorities at work and home
• Managing perceptions at work when work and family issues intersect
• Personal and professional boundaries
• Having it all versus managing it all
• Redefining your success
• Creative work strategies
• Creating effective support systems at home and work
• Making career choices to better suit your personal and family goals